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Updates from the CON IT Department, September 28, 2015

Flash Friday

Tune in to CarmenConnect at noon this Friday (10/2) for a quick half-hour of information you can use in your work every day. This week, I’ll cover five simple productivity tools and strategies to streamline your workflow and perhaps even make your everyday life a little easier.

This will not be an in-depth tutorial on any specific topic. We’ll take only 4-5 minutes per tool/strategy, so prepare for a virtual wild-ride intro tour through each one. Your students are using these tools already, and this should serve as a good opportunity for you to join them and learn how they are managing information and collaborating with each other.

Join the session at 12 p.m. on Friday (10/2): http://go.osu.edu/jonitornwall

The Internet of Things

I sometimes have a few choice words for my refrigerator when it runs out of snacks. Imagine my surprise when I learned my new refrigerator can now talk back. Not only that, it can connect to my phone via Wi-Fi and find out information to help it meet my snacking needs, among other things.

That may seem harmless enough, but the FBI recently issued a bulletin warning people about the “Internet of Things,” or all of those devices we have in our homes and workplaces that automatically send data about us into cyberspace. Do you have an internet-connected fitness monitor? Printer? Medical device? “Cyber actors,” or those who seek to cause harm by leveraging the power of our digital connectedness, aim to use internet-connected devices to attack their targets. Take time to read the FBI Public Service Announcement and their recommendations.

Go digital with your lit reviews!

If you are storing all of those articles and references on paper, making notes in the margins, and organizing them with colored sticky notes, it may be time to consider moving to a digital reference and citation manager. Our CON grad-entry student on the CON IT team, David Merriman, explores one of the many available options for you in his recent article on Mendeley. I use Mendeley myself and keep all of my articles and references there so they are accessible any time, any where I have an internet connection. You can read and annotate your PDF articles, cite while you write, search through your articles easily, create bibliographies in many different formats, and best of all, share folders of articles with your colleagues.

Getting Started with the Mendeley Citation Machine

Mendeley is a free reference manager and citation machine with many capabilities.  It allows for saving and storing research documents in a cloud based system for easy use across devices.  It is a powerful annotation tool that allows for notes to be typed directly on documents as they are read.   Mendeley integrates well with many word processors including Microsoft Word and OpenOffice allowing for the direct import of citations and subsequent bibliographies, practically eliminating errors created in this type of documentation.  There are a host of other features that one can implement within the program but the above are the most often used applications of the software.  It’s  easy to use so let’s get started!

Adding journal articles to Mendeley is as easy as downloading the document and then dragging and dropping into Mendeley.  However, there are times Mendeley fails to extract the correct information for citing the document.  An example would be for a title to be incorrectly labeled as an author’s name instead.  This flaw is relatively rare, but when it occurs, you need only reenter the information manually.  As the group at Mendeley have great tutorials, let’s take a look at one concerning this topic.

Mendeley has also made it easy to read and comment on research articles as you go. Highlighting and commenting (via “stickies”) are buttons found on the Mendeley interface that allow for quick place-marking for ideas.

Perhaps the most powerful and time-saving aspect of Mendeley is its in-paper citation capabilities. To get started, you first must add Mendeley to your word processor.  If you are using Microsoft word, click Tools and then install “MS Word plugin.”  When you next open Word, Mendeley will now be present in your Reference tabs.  To utilize it, let’s watch another Mendeley video.

You should now have a good enough grasp upon the inner workings of Mendeley to get started.  Enjoy!

Qualtrics in the College of Nursing

Welcome to Qualtrics! Follow these steps to begin using this new survey tool at OSU.  (These instructions are for faculty, staff, and students affiliated with the College of Nursing.  If you are affiliated with a different department or college at Ohio State, please contact the technology team in your area to obtain access to Qualtrics.)

  1. First go to osu.qualtrics.com and log in with your OSU name.#
  2. Explore this software option to see if it fits your educational needs!
  3. If it does, please visit this page and log in with your CON username and password for the upgrade code. (If you are unable to access the page but are in the College of Nursing, please email con-it@osu.edu for this information.)
  4. In the upper right, click on your name and then choose account settings.Screen-Shot-2015-04-01-at-3.42.35-PM-23dnly2
  5. Then choose Upgrade and enter your code.Screen-Shot-2015-04-01-at-3.45.09-PM-2lz5x7m-1024x378
  6. Now follow these Qualtrics video and text instructions if you want to learn this new system –> http://www.qualtrics.com/university/researchsuite/misc-pages/misc/learn-qualtrics-in-5-steps/

Useful Android Productivity Apps!

Android Apps

  1. Microsoft Office — document creation and editing
  2. Adobe Connect — join CarmenConnect meetings from your mobile device
  3. Dropbox — a personal cloud storage service
  4. BuckeyeBox — OSU’s official cloud storage service
  5. Google Docs — Google’s online document editing software
  6. Google Drive — Google’s online file storage
  7. Wunderlist — to-do lists that can be collaborative
  8. Evernote — write notes and access them on any device
  9. Google Hangouts — online chat client for meetings
  10. TopHat — clicker replacement for classrooms
  11. VoiceThread — multimedia social presence within online classrooms

Nursing Specific Apps

  1. UpToDate — library of clinical answers
  2. First Consult — clinical decision support resource
  3. Micromedex Free Drug Reference
  4. Micromedex Drug Interactions
  5. Micromedex IV Compatibility
  6. BrowZine — find, read, and monitor scholarly journals
  7. Stat!Ref — access to specific medical subscription books
  8. The Access Medicine — point of care information

Faculty Voting Process in Checkbox

In an attempt to streamline the voting process at CON faculty meetings, we have been placing password-protected surveys on Checkbox. To better prepare faculty for this, we have created a test survey open to anyone with a CON username and password. Faculty may access it at http://go.osu.edu/con-test-survey and take it as many times as needed to ensure it works on all of their computers, tablets, and mobile devices.

Here are some further instructions.

First, for Internet Explorer usersChoose About Internet Explorer

If you are using Internet Explorer, it will *not* work properly if it’s version 11.

To check on this, click on the little “cog” (usually on the top right of the window) and choose About Internet Explorer. (If you see a Help menu, you can also click on that and look for About Internet Explorer.)

If it says 11, please use another web browser (such as Firefox or Chrome).

Vote early, vote often…

1) When we give you a link to a survey, you’ll need to log in to vote.

Here is the link to the test survey mentioned earlier: http://go.osu.edu/con-test-survey

(Unlike the actual votes for faculty meetings, you may “stuff the ballot” for this test survey. Try it out on whatever devices you may think you’ll bring to a faculty meeting.)

2) Your username is your CON username, *without* osucon\

Put in your password, and then click on the Log In button. Pressing Enter on your keyboard will not work.

Enter username, password, and click on Log In

3) Place your vote (approve or do not approve the item in question) and click on the Finish button.

Choose an option and click on Finish

Please get in touch with us at CON-InformationTechnology@osu.edu if you have any questions about this.

Properly Adding an Email Signature to your iOS Device

There is a little trick to adding an email signature and preserving your email formatting on an iOS device!

The first step is to email yourself from your computer so that you have the proper formatting for your signature like so.

Screen-Shot-2015-03-04-at-1.25.39-PM-1ru4xqt

Then once you have done that, open up said email on your iOS device. Once there, copy and paste the signature by holding down your finger and hitting Select.

image1-1e1znzx-576x1024

Once you have done that, your screen should look like this.

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Now drag the left pin to highlight the entire signature so that it looks like this.

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Then hit copy!

Now go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Signatures and either select All Accounts or Per Account depending on how you want the signature applied.

Be sure and erase the old signature, then press and hold your finger to the screen until these options come up. Now press Paste.

image1-1-17m01mn-576x1024

Finally, physically shake your iPhone until this screen comes up

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and click Undo. Once you click that, your signature will contain the proper formatting.

iOS Apps to Consider for Productivity

Simply click on these links from your iOS device or search in the App Store to install them.

Stay tuned for the Android equivalent of this list!

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General Productivity Apps

  1. iWork suite (Apple’s version of Office) — Pages, Numbers, and Keynote
  2. Microsoft Office — Powerpoint, Excel, Word
  3. Adobe Connect — join your online CarmenConnect meetings from your mobile device
  4. Dropbox — a personal cloud storage service
  5. BuckeyeBox — OSU’s official cloud storage service
  6. Google Docs — Google’s online document editing software
  7. Google Drive — Google’s online file storage
  8. Wunderlist — to-do lists that can be collaborative
  9. Evernote — write notes and access them on any device
  10. Notability — hand write notes onto PDFs and PowerPoint presentations
  11. Google Hangouts — online chat client for meetings
  12. TopHat — clicker replacement for classrooms
  13. VoiceThread — multimedia social presence within online classrooms

Nursing Specific Apps

  1. UpToDate — library of clinical answers
  2. First Consult — clinical decision support resource
  3. Micromedex Free Drug Reference
  4. Micromedex Drug Interactions
  5. Micromedex IV Compatibility
  6. BrowZine — find, read, and monitor scholarly journals
  7. Stat!Ref — access to specific medical subscription books
  8. The Access Medicine — point of care information

If at any point you need lessons on how to use these apps, please email augenstein.33@osu.edu for assistance.

Multiple Tabs or Multiple Windows?

So you primarily have two options when working on projects through your web browser. You can either have multiple tabs open like this to do your work in

picture of multiple tabs

 

or you can select file, then new window (Mac) to have multiple browser windows open. In Microsoft Windows just select new window from its appropriate area of your browser. The other way to do this is to left click the tab itself and drag it to a different area, if you have multiple tabs open to begin with.

 

Once you have two windows you can drag them to view them both within the same screen like this

one screen, two windows

 

or, if you have multiple computer screens, drag one window to one screen and the other one to another such as this. This technique allows you to view two windows simultaneously which can be very helpful when doing tasks within systems such as Carmen.

two screens

 

Take time to experiment with these three techniques and decide which one works best for you!

Images for Free Use

In order to get free use images and avoid copyright infringement, follow these steps!

Note:  This strategy for image searching will not negate the need for responsible citation or a double-check to make sure you aren’t breaking copyright regulations!

1) Google a keyword for what you need, such as nursing. Then click images. 

Screen Shot 2015-01-13 at 12.48.16 PM2) Then click the gear on the right side of the screen and select Advanced search.

Screen Shot 2015-01-13 at 12.48.42 PM 

3) Then scroll down and select free to use or share. Finally click Advanced Search. 

Screen Shot 2015-01-13 at 12.49.10 PMNow an image bank should show up filled with images that you can use worry free for your course.

 

Posting a Note in BuckeyeBox

If you are ever presented with the need to share a document within BuckeyeBox but don’t want to go through the hassle of creating and uploading a document, follow these steps to do it within BuckeyeBox.

 

The first step in this process is to click New Box Note.

Screen Shot 2014-11-10 at 2.36.53 PMThe next step is to give the note a name.

Screen Shot 2014-11-10 at 2.37.04 PM

Now proceed to editing the note by clicking the note.

Screen Shot 2014-11-10 at 2.39.46 PM

Then edit any part of the note as you see fit, including title and text body.

Screen Shot 2014-11-10 at 2.41.59 PM